Is ours a society obsessed with face? I wish it were. Had we been really serious about our image and how to maintain it, we would have long realised what the rest of the world considers as decent standard practices.
This realisation would not only have saved us from countless unnecessary image problems, it would also have made ours a better, more humane society.
Take how our police handle rape cases involving foreign female tourists.
Take how our society treats migrant workers and their children.
Take how our society views and treats the Rohingya boat people.
Take how the red and yellow camps, who hate each others' guts, similarly ignore the state injustice and violence against the Malay Muslims in the deep South.
Take our mainstream society's fierce resistance to end rampant abuse of the lese majeste law.
Our country's image is under fire because the way we handle those issues is out of tune with modern values.
Instead of trying to see what went wrong and meet international standards, we close our hearts, continue to be defensive, and keep insisting on our "special cultural values", which only speak of our own prejudices.
Look at the recent rape case in Nakhon Si Thammarat. The police tried very hard to imply that the young Scottish woman was not a "good girl" because she was rowdy and drunk. The alleged rapist claimed the sex was consensual and the police seemed not to care that it is still a crime when the victim is in no position to put a stop to sexual violations.
At work here are gender-oppressive values that condone the crime of rape. No one seems to care.
Our society is shocked to see a 12-year-old girl Karen girl maimed for life from years of torture by a Thai couple.
Most of us believe it's an isolated incident. It's not.
Such cruelty against migrant and child workers has happened many times before. It goes on because we still insist on criminalising undocumented workers, thus making them fearful to seek help and extremely vulnerable to exploitation.
Meanwhile, our Interior Ministry is pushing for a new ministerial rule to criminalise every migrant child born in Thailand. The punishment is prompt arrest, detention, and then deportation. This rule goes against both humanitarian principles and various international conventions which reaffirm the right of a child to be with their parents, to have a legal existence, access to education, and other basic needs.
At work here is deep ethnic prejudice. Our officialdom doesn't care, nor does our mainstream society.
It's the same story with how Thailand deals with the influx of Rohingya boat people. Apart from the involvement of Thai officials in the human trafficking rackets, the policy to provide the boat people water and food before pushing them out to sea faces no public questioning. We condemn Myanmar for being racist. What about us?
Meanwhile, the red shirts are angry with the system because it aggravates disparity and perpetuates social injustice. The yellows condemn ugly money politics and widespread corruption. The ills they are against are rooted in top-down political decentralisation. Being under the spell of Buddhist nationalism, however, many in the red and yellow camps cannot understand the southern Muslims' pain against state injustice while viewing their calls for political decentralisation not as a democratisation process but as a loss of national sovereignty.
Relentless calls from the international community for a reform of the lese majeste law to prevent political abuse and to protect the monarchy continue to go unheard. Here, the democratic value on freedom of expression clashes with the old guard's zero tolerance in our increasingly open society. Why we choose to make our country look like we are still in the dark ages is beyond me.
Democracy. Human rights. Respect for cultural diversity. Decentralisation. These modern values are nothing new; they are rooted in our age-old religious teachings of tolerance, empathy and compassion. We haven't failed modern ethical standards; we have failed ourselves. Our image is in tatters because of our own heartlessness.
Sanitsuda Ekachai is Editorial Pages Editor, Bangkok Post.